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i. the monster's body is a cultural body

ii. the monster always escapes

iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis

iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference

v. the monster polices the borders of the possible

vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire

these are all direct quotes from jeffrey jerome cohen's "monster culture (seven theses)" (full pdf linked) i highly encourage you to read it yourself!

that said, while i think cohen's writing is evocative, it can be a little dense, so while i'm here, here's my capsule summary (you can also hear me talk about this in the first episode of my podcast) (listen to @ghostswerepeopletoo)

i. the monster's body is a cultural body - The monster is a work of fiction to be analyzed through tools of literary and sociological theory.

ii. the monster always escapes - As long as the cultural fear from which the monster stems persists, the monster will reappear in retellings, reimaginings, and sequels.

iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis - Monsters defy binaries and challenge easy comprehension or categorization.

iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference - The monster represents the Other.

v. the monster polices the borders of the possible - Tales of the monster exist to discourage unacceptable or taboo behaviors.

vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire - Subjects can vicariously participate in the disruption of the social order through the monster.

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There were several things on it that were antisemitic tropes, but it was not "about" antisemitic misinformation, it was about anything condemning or criticizing what's going on Palestine in general. The free space was just, the word "genocide."

Can't donate, can't call for ceasefire, can't say genocide or ethnic cleansing, can't say people are being killed in large numbers, can't oppose Israeli government...so basically you can't be against 23,000+ Palestinians being killed in any way without being antisemitic.

[ID 1: The imaginary is the means to imagine the world otherwise. A phenomenological pole extends from the sensory experience of pain to the imaginary and its transformative potentials. Pain, sitting at the base of this pole, is the organism's incapacity to transform the world through the imaginary alone.

ID 2: The 'I cannot is the primordial phenomenological experience without foundation. The hostile society in which we live constantly threatens to reduce us to this experience. Society constantly forces us to rescue ourselves from falling into the 'I cannot' which shatters our expansive capacities and renders us incapable; it constantly forces us to reinvent the 'I can' which makes this rescue possible.

The friction here is that Merleau-Ponty's 'I can' assumes an already capacitated, able-bodied, and adult male subject who can impose his will on the world with confidence. He does not reckon with a subject whose incapacities haunt the perceptual horizon through which they appraise their sense of their own bodily possibilities. end ID]

[ID: That is, pain and imagining are the "framing events" within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche. end ID]

[ID 1: In this book, I propose that disability can be described as the shrinking of the environment and its existing set of affordances for a given body or bodies, regardless of the cause of shrinkage. I use the concept of “shrinkage” to refer to the process in which possible affordances are reduced in a given body-environment relation. Shrinkage makes the field of possible affordances smaller. Smaller than what? In the case of a congenital disability, the field is smaller than for the normal. In the case of the onset of an illness, pain, or disablement, the field is smaller than it used to be. Shrinkage is a lessening or diminishing in relation to the scope or range that was available before for the person in pain, the person who falls ill, the person who becomes disabled. Irrespective of the differences in starting points of shrinkage, all cases share the common denominator of having fewer options. The environment does not afford as many possibilities as it once did, or as it currently does to privileged coinhabitants. It is exactly this scarcity of opportunities and exigencies that it creates that I want to capture with the idea of shrinkage. 

ID 2: Of all our bodily states, Elaine Scarry writes, pain is the only one without a world-counterpart. While fear, desire, and thirst can have corresponding objects, there is no thing in the world outside that can match this unique bodily urgency. Pain, she writes, is utter “objectlessness.” But I would argue that pain still involves a relation to the world, albeit one that is negative. Upon touching a hot surface, for instance, a person feels what is called “acute pain,” and — contra Scarry — that acute pain still takes, and in fact (given its essentiality to biological survival) must take, an object (in this case, the hot surface). Acute pain still offers an affordance, consequently, the affordance of avoiding what could bring harm. We can think of its affordance as avoidance, an “ill” or negative affordance. When pain becomes chronic, such negative affordances inundate the person’s space for action, making it shrink in direct correlation to the amount of pain the person experiences. The more pain you are in, the more the parameters of the environment narrow down, even (at its extreme) to the confines of a bed. From an ecological approach, chronic pain can be thus defined as the shrinking of the environment and its existing set of affordances. To experience chronic pain, I contend, is to experience the scaling down of the environment and the ever-widening distance between the body in pain and its previously available affordances.

ID 3: The constraining space of affordance from which an action can arise is evident in the following, where Drew Leder reflects on a depiction by Herbert Plügge of the “reduced sense of time and space” experienced by cardiac patients: A landscape is viewed not as a field of possibility but of difficulties to negotiate. The ordinary sense of free and spontaneous movement is now replaced by calculated effort: one does not want to take chances. Etymologically, “ease” comes from the French word aise, originally meaning “elbow room” or “opportunity.” This experience of the world-as-opportunity is precisely what dis-ease calls into question. 

“Suppose for a moment the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.”

unit 1: who do you think you are i am - auto-documentary & games

Vlogs and the Hyperreal, Folding Ideas

The Slow Death of Let's Play Videos, Meraki (to ~10:00)

World Record Progression: Mike Tyson, Summoning Salt

ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, hbomberguy

Life as a Bokoblin: A Zelda Nature Documentary, Monster Maze

optional: Braindump on the History of Let's Plays, slowbeef

unit 2: what like it's hard? - intro to challenge narratives

Chapter 26: Games as Narrative Play: Two Structures for Narrative Play, Rules of Play

A different kind of challenge run: Minimalist 100% (BOTW), Wolf Link

Surviving 100 Days on Just Dirt, Mogswamp

Can You Beat DARK SOULS III with Only Firebombs, the Backlogs

Is it Possible to Beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching?, Ceave Gaming

The Pacifist Challenge - Beating Hollow Knight Without Collecting Soul [CHALLENGE] - Sample

optional: How to 100% Snowpeak Ruins in under 15 minutes, bewildebeest

unit 3: nelly you don't understand, i AM the narrative - form and function

The Future of Writing about Games, Jacob Geller

Can You Beat GRIME Without Weapons?, the Backlogs

Mushroom Kingdom Championships, Ceave Gaming

My Life as a Barber in Hitman 2, MinMax (Leo Vader)

MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod, PowerPak

optional: Mega Microvideos, Matthewmatosis

the theme and structure is mostly intended to introduce at least one critical or historically contextual work followed by examples of the type of narrative in question.

in unit 1, this is the idea of "How do people talk about their own experiences in the context of YouTube and playing video games?" across three rather different kinds of documentaries. unit 2 is intended to take that lens of who is telling what tale and dial in on challenge running, where i first noticed the way some videos turn the story of overcoming a challenge into its own narrative that is distinct from but related to the narrative events of the game itself. unit 3 circles back to the bigger picture with a variety of examples that, to me, are maximally metanarrative, the emergent story of the player-narrator now functionally replacing the game's embedded narrative.

bonus unit: broken narratives

Glitch & the Grotesque at the MLA, Sylvia Korman

Watching time loop movies to escape my time loop, Leo Vader

The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play, Folding Ideas

Breaking Madden, Jon Bois

The TRUTH about the Pizzaplex in FNAF: Security Breach, AstralSpiff

this one is highly underdeveloped, but i'd love to work out something more robust building on randomizer challenges that produce intentionally bizarre, semi-ironic "lore," and bois-esque endeavors to break games so hard the story itself crumbles. but that's really out of scope so i'm just including the links to things i couldn't bear to get rid of. more rambling abt the challenge runs I chose under the cut.

Hi! it’s your friendly neighborhood schizoaffective and i have a story to tell, a story that’s backed by research.

my psychotic symptoms were early onset. my earliest memory of psychotic symptoms was 6 years old, when my parents were changing the locks on the house and i had an intense belief that changing them would mean someone had broken into our house and hadn’t left. i believed my toys had human emotions and felt sad if i played with another toy, so i refused to buy new toys because i was so scared of making my toys sad.

i had a very flattened emotional response (which i would later learn is a symptom of schizophrenia), and in kindergarten and first grade when we learned about emotions, i learned to fake the look of emotional response. i learned how to put a smile on my face when i felt happy and to put a frown on my face when i felt sad. when i was alone, i would practice, but some days i was too tired to do it and i kept my face in the natural way: flat. it wasn’t that i wasn’t feeling emotions, i just couldn’t express them the way people wanted me to

during my elementary school years, i made up words constantly to communicate. i couldn’t form proper sentences, something was blocked in my brain and everything felt scattered and scrambled (disorganized thoughts and speech). my teachers broke that habit in me, not by helping me learn to organize my thoughts, but by teaching me not to speak unless i knew exactly what i was trying to say.

then came middle school and i started hallucinating and my delusions got worse. but everything i had learned from teachers and tv was that hallucinations are scary to people, and i didn’t want to be scary. i would be laughed at if i told anyone about my strong beliefs (delusions) so i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t tell anyone that i believed that the characters in my tv show were real and the government was hiding their existence and if they knew that i knew they’re real, they’d put me on a watch list. i didn’t tell anyone i was hearing sounds that came straight out of a horror movie. i hid that.

i hid it so well that i avoided treatment. i had an acute psychotic episode, and all i said was that i was having panic attacks. i didn’t tell anyone about the delusion that school was going to literally kill me, or that i heard blood curdling screams in the hallways and when i was trying to sleep at night. i avoided early intervention.

for other reasons that i won’t get into, i was put on seroquel as a mood stabilizer, but as many of you know, it’s also an antipsychotic. this was the first time in my life i felt some kind of relief from my symptoms. i didn’t connect the dots because my psychiatrist called it a mood stabilizer, not an antipsychotic, so i didn’t know why i was feeling better in those areas.

it wasn’t until 10th grade when i was taking a psychology class from a teacher i trusted that i connected the dots. by this time i knew i had psychosis. i had access to the internet and i had googled what was wrong with me, but it wasn’t until a class where he emphasized getting help that i thought ok, now i should bring it up.

by this point, i had had 2 more acute psychotic episodes that kept me out of school, but because i was taught to hide everything, i still didn’t tell anyone the real reason why i couldn’t function. “paralyzing panic attacks” became code for “whatever the real reason is that’s keeping him out of school”. but my teacher made me think i needed help, especially because we were learning about schizophrenia in class and i had a sneaking suspicion that i, someone with a family history of schizophrenia, had it.

i brought it up to my doctors and i was started on antipsychotics, this time with the official name of antipsychotics. but it was a bit too late. my psychiatrist told me that if we had caught it earlier, i may have reacted to treatment better.

i’ve been in treatment for years and the longest i’ve gone without an acute psychotic episode is 5 months. i’ve done my research and in patients with psychosis, the first few months after psychotic symptoms are present are vital to the treatment and recovery of the patient.

it’s not just, oh you won’t suffer as long, it’s literally you will have a better chance at recovery. if you catch psychosis in the prodromal stage, it can greatly reduce the chances of another psychotic episode happening.

by being taught to hide my illness from a young age, i lost the chance at having an easier recovery. yes i learned to confine myself to societal expectations and appear “normal”, but i caused myself more pain in the long run.

early intervention is key to an easier recovery, and i’m going to leave a few links to show you what i mean.

ted talk about early psychotic intervention

psychosis prodromal phase

talking with a psychiatrist about early psychosis intervention

early intervention of psychosis